To anticipate where AI hardware needs to go, you must reason from first principles about what a digital worker will need — tools, file access, research — and build for that, not just react to current trends.
Jensen explains that rather than just listening to industry whispers, NVIDIA reasons from first principles about what AI agents will need — such as tool use, file access, and research capabilities — and designs hardware accordingly, years in advance. ✦ AI generated
Jensen Huang · Lex Fridman · 2026-03-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 32:38
No matter what happens, at some point in order for that large language model to be a digital worker... You just reason about it. You could just sit there, enjoy a glass of whiskey, and think about all these things, and it would become completely obvious. If you take the OpenClaw schematic that I used at GTC, you'll find it two years ago. Literally, two years ago at GTC, I was talking about agentic systems that exactly reflect OpenClaw today.
verbatim transcript · starts at 32:38
32:38for that large language model to be a digital worker... Let's just, let's just use that metaphor. Let's say that we want the LLM to be a digital worker. What does that have to do? It has to access ground truth. That's our file system. It has to be able to do research. It doesn't know everything. We don't have... And I don't wanna wait until this AI becomes, you know, universally
33:01smart about everything, past, present, and future before I make it useful. And so therefore, I might as well let it go do research. It's obviously, if it wants to help me, it's gotta use my tools. You know, a lot of people would say, "You know AI is gonna completely destroy software. We don't need software anymore. We don't even need tools anymore." That's ridiculous. Let's use the... Let's use a thought experiment.
33:25And you could just sit there, enjoy a glass of whiskey, and, and think about all these things, and it would become completely obvious. Like, if I were to create the most amazing- the most amazing agent that we can imagine in the next 10 years. Let's say it'd be a humanoid robot. If that humanoid robot were to be created, is it more likely that the humanoid robot comes into my house
33:50and uses the tools that I have to do the work that it needs to do? Or does this hand turns into a 10-pound hammer in one instance, turns into a scalpel in another instance, and in order to boil water, it beams, you know, microwaves out of its fingers? You know, or is it more likely just to use a microwave, you know? And the first time it goes up to the microwave,
34:13it probably doesn't know how to use it. But that's okay. It's connected to the internet. It reads the manual of this microwave, reads it, instantly becomes an expert. And so it uses it. And so I think the... I just described, in fact, almost all of the properties of OpenClaw. You know, that it's gonna use tools, that it's gonna access files, it's gonna be able to do research. It has I/O subsystem. And when you're done